o an understanding. You're all alone. So am I. Well, why not
live together?"

She smiled, with that disillusion which comes to a soul that life has
bit by bit ravaged of all its dreams.

"You're crazy to talk that way, Benjamin," she would answer.

"Why?"

"Oh, because."

"Come now, explain that! Why am I crazy?"

Rafaela did not want to annoy the man, because she would thus lose a
customer, and so she gave him an evasive answer:

"Why, I'm already old."

"Not for me!"

"I'm ugly!"

"That's a matter of taste. You suit _me_ to a T."

"Thanks. But, what would people say? And suppose we had any children,
Benjamin! What would they think of us?"

"Oh, there's a thousand ways to cover it all up. You just take a shine
to me, and I'll fix everything else."

Rafaela promised to think it over; and every night when she came home
from work, Benjamin jokingly asked her, from his door:

"Well, neighbor, how about it?"

"I'm still thinking it over," she answered, with a laugh.

"It seems to be pretty hard for you to decide."

"It surely is!"

"Yes, but are you going to get it settled?"

"How do _I_ know, Benjamin? Sometimes I think one thing, and sometimes
another. Time will tell!"

But the soul of Rafaela lay dead. Nothing could revive her illusions.
The shoemaker, after many efforts, had to give her up. And always after
that, when he saw her pass along, he would heave a sigh in an absurd,
romantic manner.

On the first of every month, Rafaela always wrote a four-page letter to
Zureda, containing all the petty details of her quiet, humdrum life. It
was by means of these letters, written on commercial cap, that the
prisoner learned the rapid physical growth of little Manolo. By the time
the boy had reached twelve years he had become rebellious, quarrelsome
and idle. He was still in the pot-hook class, at school. Stone-throwing
was one of his favorite habits. One day he injured another boy of his
age so severely that the constable gathered him in, and nothing but the
fatherly intervention of the priest saved him from a night in the
lock-up.

Rafaela always ended up the paragraphs thus, in which she described the
fierce wildness of the boy:

"I tell you plainly, I can't manage him."

This seemed a confession of weariness, that outlined both a threat and a
prophecy.

The prisoner wrote her, in one of his letters:

"The last jail pardon, that you may have read about in the papers, let
out many of my co